More than a year later, Fuentes has still not publicized his "list" of cheats.

Coincidence ?

07-19-2012 09:56 PM

Mjau!

Re: Yannick Noah suspects Spain's success a fraud.

Why do you think all these foreign cycling stars like Armstrong, Landis, Hamilton, Basso, Scarponi, Ullrich, Jaksche, and so on, went to Spain to dope? Why is that? You think that somehow makes Spain look better, because "they do it too", but it only makes Spain's anti-doping efforts look even worse! It suggests Travis Tygart (see above) was right. It suggests Der Spiegel had it right.

Quote:

A paradise for performance enhancement

Besides, until now there has been very little public pressure in Spain to prosecute those involved in performance enhancement. Even El País, an investigative newspaper that now leads the pack in reporting on "Operation Mountain Pass," was long averse to even addressing the topic.
This atmosphere allowed Spain to develop into a paradise for athletes interested in performance enhancement. The first reports about compliant doctors and well-equipped laboratories began making the rounds in the track and field world in the late 1990s.

Travis Tygart, the chief executive of the US Anti-Doping Agency... says the performances of athletes from Jamaica, Russia and Spain are compromised because drug testing in those countries is not stringent enough and does not involve out-of-competition and no-notice testing, or tests for EPO and human growth hormone.

Tygart said: 'There does currently exist a divide between a number of nations that are running the most effective programmes. You look at the UK, France, Norway and, hopefully, the US. They are in stark contrast to the quality of the [anti-doping] programmes in Spain, Jamaica, Russia.

'Frankly, athletes from those countries [Jamaica, Spain and Russia] deserve to be able to say: "Hey, we're clean. And not only are we clean but we're held to the highest standard". I feel bad for athletes from those countries, because they don't have the ability to say that.'

^^ People should know about some issues in the recent history of Spain.

First, Barcelona Olympics. This meant a huge boost for PROFESSIONAL sport in Spain.

Second, a key was Spanish culture and their character. I'm starting to be an old man but I remember in my youth I lived playing on the streets like the rest of the Spanish kids. And we have a comfortable home and a TV too, but climate and sociability in Spain invited us to go out. When Spanish authorities channel all that into base sports suddenly every neighborhood, every town had several teams and many sports competitions. We had the street culture that you can see in many Third World countries but with the means of the first world. And of course, every success of a Spanish athletes reinforced the process.

Third, the 'Spanish brick fever' helps too Every town, even the smallest, built his own sports arena. For some reason we went mad raising infrastructure everywhere. That have led us to the brink of bankruptcy, but one of its side effects is that also helped sport here.

For the records, I know that none of these clown trolls are going to read this, nor Yannick the Frenchie buffoon, but I need write some English

(5) Aggravating circumstances justifying a period of ineligibility greater than the standard sanction.

Dr. Luis Garcia del Moral was the Team Doctor for the USPS Cycling Team for the period from 1999 through 2003. Subsequently, Dr. del Moral continued to serve as a physician for many cyclists. He currently works as a sports doctor in Valencia, Spain.

With respect to Dr. del Moral, numerous riders will testify that Dr. del Moral gave to them, encouraged them to use and/or assisted them in using doping products and/or prohibited methods, including EPO, blood transfusions, testosterone, hGH, cortisone and infusions of saline, plasma and/or glycerol during the period from 1999 through 2005. Riders and other witnesses will also testify that del Moral worked actively to conceal rule violations by himself and others throughout the period from 1999 through the present.

The United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) announced today that Dr. Luis Garcia del Moral (cycling team doctor), Dr. Michele Ferrari (cycling team consulting doctor) and Jose "Pepe" Martí (cycling team trainer) have all received lifetime periods of ineligibility as the result of their anti-doping rule violations in the United States Postal Service (USPS) Cycling Team Doping Conspiracy.

USADA CEO Travis Tygart confirmed to Cyclingnews that Ferrari, Del Moral and Marti accepted their lifetime bans. "The respondents chose not to waste resources by moving forward with the arbitration process, which would only reveal what they already know to be the truth of their doping activity."

Dr. del Moral, of Valencia, Spain, was the team physician for the USPS Cycling Team from 1999 through 2003. Until recently Dr. del Moral was affiliated with a sports medicine clinic in Valencia, Spain. USADA’s evidence is that after 2003, Dr. del Moral assisted individual cyclists, including a number of former USPS team members, with their doping. The evidence in Dr. del Moral’s case demonstrated that from 2000 he was intimately involved in the prohibited method of blood transfusions which cyclists use to boost the number of circulating red blood cells to increase the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood and increase endurance. Dr. del Moral brought riders to his sports medicine clinic in Valencia, Spain where he withdrew blood for prohibited blood transfusions. Dr. del Moral also assisted with saline infusions in order to keep the rider’s blood levels below threshold levels to avoid detection of their drug use. In addition to blood transfusions and saline infusions, Dr. del Moral administered banned performance- enhancing drugs including EPO, testosterone, corticosteroids and hGH to cyclists by providing these drugs to them, recommending the use of these drugs and directly injecting riders with these prohibited drugs.

Cycling Doctor Under a Microscope
Luis García del Moral, Who Worked for Lance Armstrong's U.S. Postal Service Team, Becomes Target of Doping Investigators.

A letter last week from the United States Anti-Doping Agency accused Garcia del Moral of participating in a covert doping program as a physician on Armstrong's Postal team from 1999 to 2003.

García del Moral aggressively promoted an undercover regimen of banned drugs and medical procedures, allegations reflected in last week's USADA letter. "Numerous riders will testify that Dr. del Moral gave to them, encouraged them to use and/or assisted them in using doping products and/or prohibited methods," said the USADA letter.

From the minute that the chain-smoking García del Moral showed up at the Postal team's training camp in 1999 in Austin, Texas, he began overseeing the administration of performance enhancing drugs.

the former riders say, he injected riders with drugs or performed blood transfusions that are banned in the sport.

One former rider said García del Moral injected him with corticosteroids. Another rider said he didn't want to take performance-enhancing drugs because he feared the health consequences. But one day, the rider said, García del Moral told him, "you're not a real professional if you don't take drugs." The rider said, "That really (angered) me." The rider said he responded, "'Well, you're not really a doctor.'"

Q: How did you manage your doping in ’05? The Wall St Journal piece said: Mister Landis said he hired a Spanish doctor in Valencia to take transfusions and paid one person $10,000 to make two separate deliveries of half-litre bags of blood during the 2005 Tour de France.

A: In 2004, the Postal Service got rid of Luis Garcia Del Moral, who was the team doctor, and I knew that he was often in charge of the logistics of doing transfusions and things like that, so I just contacted him and asked if he would do it for me. So I paid him to do it.

Q: Del Moral?

A: Yeah.

Q: You paid Del Moral?

A: Yeah.

Q: Did that ‘work’?

A: Did it work? Yeah, the reason that I was not as good in 2005 as I was in 2004 or 2006 was because I had surgery that winter and wasn’t walking for weeks and it took a while to get back in shape. So drugs or no drugs weren’t going to change that. I did the same thing in 2004 and 2005 and 2006; the one variable was that I had my hip issues to deal with and therapy and things like that. I mean, in all of the Tours I did exactly the same amount of blood (transfusing) except the first one (2002); the first one I did one transfusion which is 500 millilitres and the next four I did 1000 militaries each, three separate times in 2006, because it was easier to maintain the continuous blood parameters that were being checked. But it ended up being the same total volume that I added so…yeah, Del Moral, in spite of denying that he ever saw any doping, like everybody does, that was all he really did.

García del Moral continued to work with athletes at the Instituto de Medicina del Deporte [IMD], a Valencia health clinic that specializes in sports injuries and performance-enhancing treatments. Staff members say the center, part of a network that includes several others in Spain, is managed by the regional government and works often with professional athletes, including cyclists, track-and-field athletes, soccer and tennis players, providing advice on nutrition and training regimes and top-class fitness equipment.

The Operación Puerto doping case (Operation Mountain Pass) is a Spanish doping case against doctor Eufemiano Fuentes and a number of accomplices, started in May 2006. He is accused of administering prohibited doping products to 200 professional athletes, to enhance their performance.

Spanish police raided residences. In one, belonging to Fuentes, they found a thousand doses of anabolic steroids, 100 packets of blood products, and machines to manipulate and transfuse them.

In March 2004 in an interview with the Spanish newspaper Diario AS, Jesús Manzano exposed systematic doping in his former cycling team, Kelme. He detailed blood doping as well as the performance-enhancing drugs he used while on the team. The investigation and the allegations he made led to questioning of several members of the team in April 2004. These included Eufemiano Fuentes who was the Kelme team doctor, Walter Virú the doctor before Fuentes, and Alfredo Córdova who was working for Liberty Seguros-Würth but involved with Kelme in 2003. An investigation began into the practices of Fuentes in early 2006 by the anti-drug trafficking arm of the Spanish Guardia Civil.

The wife of the doctor at the center of Spain's biggest doping investigation says Spanish sports would be ruined if she revealed what she knows about drug use among athletes.
"I know what happened at Barcelona '92 and I'm a Pandora's Box that, if opened one day, could bring down sport,"

The first case of performance enhancement to which Fuentes has been linked was a family affair. It happened in the mid-1980s, and the athlete in question was Cristina Pérez, Fuentes's wife.
A few years later, Fuentes, after developing contacts to the cycling scene, became team physician for various profession teams, ultimately even becoming their training and competition strategist. The physician never seemed to be bothered by persistent rumors of his involvement in doping activities. "I was always under suspicion," he says, "but nothing ever happened."
The more successful his riders became, the safer and more confident Fuentes felt. Before a difficult individual time trial in the 1991 Tour of Spain, or Vuelta, the doctor was sitting on a plane bound for the Spanish Mediterranean island of Mallorca. Fuentes told journalists also traveling on the flight that the cooler on the seat next to him contained "the key to victory in the Vuelta." His comments proved to be true, when a pro on the team sponsored by Fuentes's employer at the time, Once, won not only the difficult time trial but also the overall tour.

A paradise for performance enhancement

Besides, until now there has been very little public pressure in Spain to prosecute those involved in performance enhancement. Even El País, an investigative newspaper that now leads the pack in reporting on "Operation Mountain Pass," was long averse to even addressing the topic.This atmosphere allowed Spain to develop into a paradise for athletes interested in performance enhancement. The first reports about compliant doctors and well-equipped laboratories began making the rounds in the track and field world in the late 1990s. The suspicion that a network had developed in this environment was confirmed last year when the police staged a spectacular coup against the drug cartel. In a series of raids on the Spanish mainland, as well as on the Canary and Balearic Islands, police secured 10 tons of illegal doping products.

Are your clients or patients only cyclists or have you also treated athletes from other sports?
Fuentes: "I've treated athletes from many sports: cyclists, tennis players, athletes (track & field), footballers .... Twenty-five years of work make room for a lot."
What percentage of those treated were cyclists and other athletes respectively?
Fuentes: "It's hard to say ... But let's say there has been 30 percent cyclists, 20 percent tennis players, another 20 percent football players and 30 percent belonged to other sports."

Pat McQuaid, president of the UCI Road World Federation, told WDR that he received in 2006, in the presence of investigative authorities and the Spanish sports minister, information that other sports would be affected: swimming, rowing, tennis and football.

Jesús María Manzano Ruano (San Lorenzo de El Escorial, May 12, 1978) is a former Spanish professional road racing cyclist. He is famous as the whistleblower of systematic doping within his cycling team and his statements led the Guardia Civil to conduct the Operación Puerto investigation around the sport doctor Eufemiano Fuentes.

Two years after Manzano’s first allegations to the international press, the Operación Puerto investigation began in early 2006 with the result of arrests in May 2006. Manzano’s statements had led directly to the development of this investigation.

Doping whistleblower Jesus Manzano, whose statements to the Spanish federation and government are believed to have initiated the Puerto investigation, has claimed an international footballer and three prominent Spanish athletes had been treated by the doctor at the centre of the Puerto inquiry, Eufemiano Fuentes. Speaking to German TV channel ZDF, Manzano said of the footballer: "It is a player who I do not meet that much because he is travelling a lot with his club and the national team. He is now afraid like everyone else." Manzano also alleged he had seen two-time world marathon champion Abel Anton, former European 5,000-metre champion Alberto Garcia and Spanish 1,500-metre athlete Reyes Estevez in the hotel where Fuentes is claimed to have offered consultations.

"Fuentes had other athletes. Track & field athletes, rowers and he spoke of football players," said Manzano. "He told us that he had problems with the football club Las Palmas and besides, blood analyses of football players were found during the searches of Fuentes' home in Madrid."

In a further doping scandal, in 2010, Fuentes was arrested by Spanish police as part of Operación Galgo (Operation Greyhound). In a series of simultaneous raids across five provinces on 9 December, Spanish police seized a large quantity of anabolic steroids, hormones and EPO, as well as laboratory equipment for blood transfusions. According to Público newspaper, Eufemiano Fuentes and his sister Yolanda were the leaders of the alleged plot. Also arrested were the athlete Marta Dominguez, who was released on bail after having been charged with the trafficking and distribution of doping substances, and Alberto Leon, now retired from mountain biking, in whose fridge anti-doping police found several bags of blood.

Each page corresponds to the doping planning for each type of athletic competition, aimed at the athletes he trains,” said a Guardia Civil statement. In documents seen by El Pais, Pascua acknowledges that he has partaken in doping with several of his athletes.
Rather than the cryptic, but obvious, codenames used by Fuentes’ blood-doping ring, where cyclists were named after their dogs, Pascua used simple letter/number codes for his athletes. According to the Guardia Civil A15 refers to Nuria Fernández, B15-30 to Reyes Estévez, A1 to Murillo Digna Luz and B8B to Eugenio Barrios.

I guess Fuentes was telling the truth about "treating" track athletes and Manzano was right about Garcia and Estevez and about Fuentes still being active, but what they said about footballers is just nonsense, right?

Surely Fuentes and his clients were actually punished this time?

Quote:

Charges against Eufemiano Fuentes dismissed

Operacion Galgo, or “Operation Greyhound,” the Spanish investigation into an alleged blood doping ring involving Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes has been closed due to “a lack of evidence.”

Yannick Noah had the nerve to tell Juan Carlos Ferrero not to stop at one like he did. Juanqui did win just one slam, but he also made at least the quarters in every slam. Yannick was a true "one slam wonder" someone who did absolutely nothing but have one long party. Noah is nowhere near in Juan Carlos' class as a player or a person.

07-16-2012 10:52 PM

Kiedis

Re: Yannick Noah suspects Spain's success a fraud.

^^ People should know about some issues in the recent history of Spain.

First, Barcelona Olympics. This meant a huge boost for PROFESSIONAL sport in Spain.

Second, a key was Spanish culture and their character. I'm starting to be an old man but I remember in my youth I lived playing on the streets like the rest of the Spanish kids. And we have a comfortable home and a TV too, but climate and sociability in Spain invited us to go out. When Spanish authorities channel all that into base sports suddenly every neighborhood, every town had several teams and many sports competitions. We had the street culture that you can see in many Third World countries but with the means of the first world. And of course, every success of a Spanish athletes reinforced the process.

Third, the 'Spanish brick fever' helps too Every town, even the smallest, built his own sports arena. For some reason we went mad raising infrastructure everywhere. That have led us to the brink of bankruptcy, but one of its side effects is that also helped sport here.

For the records, I know that none of these clown trolls are going to read this, nor Yannick the Frenchie buffoon, but I need write some English

Cyclists compete doped, we all know that, the Spaniards and the rest. The last doper caught at 'Tour of France' was French, but sure Noah don't make any issue about this. Moreover, except in cycling Spain sucks in every other sport where raw physicality is more important that the technical or tactical departaments like for example athletics, swimming, weightlifting, etc...

But whatever, trolls gonna trolling.

Exactly.

Doesn't matter that there's a huge work done in the youth levels in several sports in the country...

07-16-2012 08:17 PM

Kiedis

Re: Yannick Noah suspects Spain's success a fraud.

German tabloids trying to divert attention from the real scandal reverting to the old and trite case of Dr. Fuentes.

Cyclists compete doped, we all know that, the Spaniards and the rest. The last doper caught at 'Tour of France' was French, but sure Noah don't make any issue about this. Moreover, except in cycling Spain sucks in every other sport where raw physicality is more important that the technical or tactical departaments like for example athletics, swimming, weightlifting, etc...